The strange “death of the university”: experience in philosophical interpretation

The reform of university education has become permanent since the event that M. Heidegger defined as the “death of the university”. The apparent contradiction -“what is being reformed that no longer exists” - presupposes the need for a philosophical interpretation. An urgent research task is to clarify the meaning of the ongoing reforms in connection with the clarification of the meaning of Heidegger’s statement. The paper reveals the ontic foundations of the reality of the “university of mind” (classical university). The conclusion is made that they are absent in modernity: science and education, which determined the concept and reality of a classical university, no longer exist. Modern science is defined by the idea of technology and is a political science. Instead of human education, which was the task of the “university of mind”, the goal of higher education is the “factory production” of a specialist: the formation of competencies and the production of human capital. This “factory” is a technical school and is still called a university only in the sense of a technical term. It is concluded that the form of the modern innovative university is a corporation, and the content of the process of constructing a university as a corporation is digitalization.